On Fox this weekend, Mark Levin offered his listeners a description of the American economy that left no room for doubt. 'We have no monopolies in America, none,' he said. 'We have no oligarchs in America, none' [1]. The words are a political argument, not a measurement - a way of saying the market is working and its critics are conjuring villains. Set against the public record, the 'none, none' is where the argument strains, which is why the fair move is to label it and lay the record beside it rather than score it true or false.
On monopolies, the record is not a matter of opinion. A federal judge ruled in United States v. Google that 'Google is a monopolist' and ordered remedies; a second federal court found Google liable for illegally monopolizing advertising-technology markets [2]. Whatever one makes of the cases, the finding that a monopoly exists in America is one the courts have already entered.
On 'oligarchs' - Levin's shorthand for a captured, politically wired economy - the freshest evidence cuts against him from an unexpected direction. The federal government itself has taken equity stakes in a string of public companies over the past year: about 9.9 percent of Intel, 15 percent of MP Materials, 10 percent each of Lithium Americas and Trilogy Metals, and a 'golden share' in U.S. Steel [3]. A government buying ownership positions in private firms is a great many things; a pure, hands-off free market is not one of them.
Data
| Intel | 9.9% ownership |
|---|---|
| Lithium Americas | 10% ownership |
| Trilogy Metals | 10% ownership |
| MP Materials | 15% ownership |
None of this makes Levin's sentence false the way a figure can be false, which is exactly why it sits in its own category - a broad characterization, delivered as fact, that the record does not match. The reason to set the two side by side is that 'we have no monopolies, none' is not merely cheerleading; it is a case against acting on concentration, made to a large audience at the very moment the courts and the government's own balance sheet are describing the opposite.
'None, none' is a slogan. The record next to it - court-ruled monopolies in search and ad-tech, federal ownership stakes in five companies - reads the other way [2][3].
